ELF – Engelsk läsförståelse (HPVAR2026P4)

James Bond Forever?

In the following text there are gaps which indicate that something has been left out. Look at the four alternatives that correspond to each gap and decide which one best fits the gap. Then mark your choice on your answer sheet.

When James Bond first appeared in the pages of Casino Royale (1953), Britain was in a postwar slump. Many bombed-out buildings had yet to be reconstructed or cleared away. The economy was recovering, but there had been many years of   31  , and some commodities were still rationed. Hanging in the air was an uneasy sense that Britain was losing its status as a global power.

Yet Ian Fleming’s novel was a glamorous tale of derring-do, with sex, gadgets and guns. His 007 was an agent of MI6, Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and he was formidable. He could bed and kill whomever he pleased; he brought down foreign crime syndicates, for the most part on his own, though American money often helped. If Fleming was concerned about the fall of empire, his books provided an escapist form of wish fulfilment. “Bond embodied the   32   possibility that England might once again be placed at the centre of world affairs during a period when its world-power status was visibly and rapidly declining,” two critics wrote in Bond and Beyond (1987), a cultural history of the hero.

The 25th film in the series, No Time to Die, continues this make-believe. The plot follows Bond as he is brought out of retirement in Jamaica for one final job: to track down a scientist. But if the premise for this globe-trotting tale of British exceptionalism seems   33  , the making of the film was anything but. Its title was changed several times. The screenplay went through several iterations; five people are credited as writers.

Yet the clearest evidence of change may be found not in the film’s depiction of Bond, but of women.   34  , many of the female characters have been mere sexual props, often sporting provocative names. In the wake of #MeToo, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the creator of the TV series “Fleabag”, was tasked with injecting some humour into the script and making its female figures more realistic.   35   abound that, following Bond’s retirement, MI6 has given the 007 codename to a black woman. Britain may once again be yearning to return to a mythical, glorious past – but James Bond, it seems, is coming to terms with the modern world.

Rachel Lloyd, The Economist

Killer Cats

In the US, the debate about free-roaming cats has been raging for years. Research has shown that cats – mostly feral but also pets – kill billions of birds and mammals every year. And while it’s primarily motivated by perceived risks from coyotes and traffic, 70% of US cat owners now keep their cats inside, up from 35% in the late 1990s.

UK cat owners feel differently: about 70% let their cats out, a similar percentage to other European countries. Access to the great outdoors is considered good for cats’ wellbeing, a position shared by charities such as Cats Protection, and there are few predators to worry about. The EU has even declared that it believes in the free movement of cats. “It’s a massive societal difference [from the US],” says Robbie McDonald, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Exeter.

But cats are prolific hunters of wildlife in the UK and Europe, too. A study based on the 2011 pet population estimates that UK cats kill 160 to 270 million animals annually, a quarter of them birds. The real figure is likely to be even higher, boosted by the pandemic pet craze. So is it time to reconsider the British laissez-faire attitude to free-roaming cats?

It is well established that cats can have serious impacts on wildlife and even cause extinctions. The most famous example is Lyall’s wren, a small flightless bird that once lived on Stephens Island, New Zealand. When Europeans arrived on the island in the late 1800s, they brought their cats – within the year, Lyall’s wren was gone.

In the UK and Europe, however, cat invasions happened a long time ago. Cats were brought from the Fertile Crescent to south-eastern Europe several thousand years ago, and then introduced to Britain by the Romans. “We’ve had a much longer history of dealing with any impact that they may have had,” says Philip Baker, a mammologist at the University of Reading.

Though the relationship between how many cats live in an area and how many birds they take is not straightforward, there is evidence that when cat numbers go up, so do cat kills. A large 2019 study found that the number of garden birds killed by cats in France and Belgium has increased by more than 50% in 15 years, alongside an increase in those countries’ pet cat populations.

However, not everyone is convinced that cats are actually putting bird populations under pressure. According to Philip Baker, the birds most hunted by cats have so many young that they can afford to lose a lot of them. The UK’s biggest bird charity, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, is not particularly concerned about the impact of cats on the British mainland. Instead, it focuses on what it says is driving UK bird declines: global warming, intensive agriculture and expanding towns and cities leading to habitat and food loss. A big reason why it is less worried is the evidence that cats primarily take “the doomed surplus”: weak or injured birds likely to die anyway.

Although Philip Baker sees no evidence that cats are responsible for UK bird declines, he agrees that there is a problem worth discussing. “Cats are one of the biggest welfare issues for wildlife in this country,” he says.

So should the British adopt the American way and ditch free roaming? Though it is early days, a growing minority are keeping their cats fully indoors. And that worries Daniel Cummings from Cats Protection. “We’re not saying that all cats need to go outside,” he says, but if indoor-only became the norm, some cats “would have significantly reduced welfare”.

Instead, Cats Protection recommends a dusk-till-dawn cat curfew. Cats and birds are most active at dusk and dawn. “It’s a sensible compromise,” says Cummings. “You’re effectively reducing the risk of [the cats] getting in a road traffic collision overnight, and also reducing the risk of predation.”

Tara Pirie, a cat ecologist from the University of Reading who has studied wild leopards in South Africa, is also conflicted about confining cats permanently. She thinks cat-free buffer zones around conservation areas could be a good idea, but that the most important thing is to listen to people’s concerns. “Most people who own cats are animal people,” she says. “They don’t want to have this impact on wildlife either.”

But from the perspective of Peter Marra, an ecologist at Georgetown University in the US and one of the authors of the 2016 book Cat Wars, none of this goes far enough. “I don’t think there should be a compromise,” he says. “It’s about people taking responsibility for their animal.” What that means, however, might prove to be a cultural difference.

Ida Emilie Steinmark, The Guardian Weekly